Friday, May 16, 2014

Score reading in Studio City - Getting 'under the hood'

The cabaret room of Vitello's in Studio City (the
same suburb where Mack Sennett built his film lot in 1927; where The Brady
Bunch lived in the early 1970s) is not the sort of place you'd expect to find
composer activity on a Friday morning. But once a month, of a Friday, 50+ LA
composers meet there as members of the Academy of Scoring Arts.

The morning comprises not only breakfast but Adventures in Listening, an hour's critiquing of each other's anonymously-submitted
demo-CDs, followed by The Ravel Study Group - an hour-long, bar-by-bar, stave-by-stave
study of orchestral scores. The last hour is always a guest. On the mornings I've been there, the guests
have included Mike Lang with his Trio, Tyler Bates who co-wrote the theme for Californication, Jonathan Wilson (maker
of guitarviols), Emmy-winner Richard Bellis (who won for his theme to Stephen
King's It) and Eddie Karam (who
worked with John Williams on the orchestration of Harry Potter films after reconstructing the lost scores of Busby
Berkeley musicals for Williams and the Boston Pops at a week's notice).

Ron Jones leads a listening session

The Academy of Scoring Arts is a growing operation. There
are chapters in Seattle, Toronto, Portland (OR), San Diego, New York City and,
soon, Chicago. And the LA-based Academy has also begun hosting 'happy hours'
for film, music and media professionals and offers conductor masterclasses and
copyright seminars. I went along to a Friday morning session after hearing that
this group was aiming to maintain Hollywood's high standards in musicianship,
something I've been interested to find out more about since I arrived in LA a
year ago.

Some of the critiquing in the first hour is quite vigorous. 'If you know the producer
reads Emily Dickinson, sure', says convenor Ron Jones of one particularly
gentle passage of music. 'But most producers are AAARRGGGHHH. They drink too
much coffee. They meet you in Starbucks. Their eyes are like [he mimes eyes prised open.]' 'Be
careful of too much,' he later exhorts. 'Whatever plays, changes the
equation....If you've been using a lot of timpani, maybe change it to Gran
Cassa...'

But the musicians comprising the Academy of Scoring
Arts are not aspirants. They're working composers and sound engineers -
credited and uncredited film, TV and video game composers,underscorers, jingle writers, the folk who
write the music for trailers (yes, there are such people), staff composers,
orchestrators, the people who sometimes have to make several pages of sketches
sound terrific overnight 'in time for a 10 o'clock downbeat'. In fact, the
morning is mostly about orchestrating: how to use the orchestra in the most
telling fashion in terms of the story to the highest level of musical excellence
to the greatest satisfaction of the players - to deadline! At the moment
they're studying Star Wars. They get
through about 12 bars per session.

'This is why you need to study counterpoint' says
convenor Ron Jones, pointing to a passage in Williams' score and explaining why
a composer needs to give every player a line. 'You don't just stack stuff'. Jones,
who until recently wrote the music for the 75-piece orchestra that plays under
the cartoon series, The Family Guy, set up the Academy back in 2011 because
even composers in LA feel they need to keep honing their skills. 'Everyone in
this town is great,' he says, 'so if you're going to make a dent, you have to
be sharper....plus you want to connect with people. If you tried to ring
everyone in this room to have lunch, you'd kill yourself.' Del Engen, vice
president of the organisation, says another aim is to start getting directors
and producers thinking more about the music in their films, and that's the
reason for a monthly industry networking 'happy hour' recently launched at
Busby's on Wilshire Boulevard.

I asked Mark Smythe (a New Zealand-born composer and
former Melbourne resident) why he takes part. He's recently signed on to write
the music for Chris Sun's 'Aussie Horror' Charlie's
Farm. Isn't he busy enough as it is? 'Because I would not be so
arrogant as to think I had nothing more to learn,' he says. He also says he
loves the quotes. And Jones is full of them: 'Don't forget listener reaction is
also a "score".' Or, 'Doubling doesn't make it bigger.... when you
double everything all the time, you cancel things. You cause problems. But when
you see it's just a clarinet with the strings, all of a sudden it opens up.
That's Mozartean. Mozart was on a whole other plateau.'

Dara Taylor arrived in Los Angeles from Brooklyn, NY
about five months and has come to every meeting since. Why? 'We all know who
the "great" composers are.' she says. 'But with that knowledge we can
either quietly stew in jealousy or get under the hood and find real, applicable
reasons WHY they're great. I personally love being able to look at how John
Williams approached a certain flute motif and then find a way to incorporate
that technique in my own work. It expands my orchestration palette beyond what
I learned in school.'

Dara Taylor studies Star Wars on her tablet

The thing that strikes me about the Academy of
Scoring Arts is they're studying the repertoire greats. 'I'm studying Ockeghem
because I read that Stravinsky was studying it when he wrote his late
masterpieces,' says Jones. 'My brother,' says Don Williams, percussionist
brother of the composer of Star Wars, 'rang me up the other night. He
says, "I'm looking at the second movement of Beethoven's 9th". He's
always going back to the originals.'

The score study part of the morning is called the
Ravel Study Group after the first score they studied: Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe. I've come too late to
participate in the two and a half years they spent on Stravinsky's Rite of
Spring (whose composer lived almost directly south across the Hollywood Hills
from here). Next up, they're thinking of Respighi's Pines of Rome. But if it took the group two and a half years to get
through Rite of Spring and
they're only at bar 182 of Star Wars after several months, Pines of Rome might be a ways off. Of
course, it doesn't matter. The gems they pick out of a morning's 3-minute demos
or 12 bars of orchestral score intensify each participant's own awareness of
musical texture.

As I walk out onto Tujunga Avenue's restaurant strip
busy with lunchtime customers, I muse on the fact that in this capital of media
entertainment there are so many composers concerning themselves with orchestral
writing (and that includes emulating the nuances of human performance if
they've only got enough budget for a Midi).

'As I walk out onto Tujunga Avenue's restaurant strip...'

I'll probably never watch a trailer
or ad or cartoon again without listening more intently to the use of orchestra
as well. Of course, Beethoven didn't have modern media, but Stravinsky's
favourite TV show was Daktari. He'd possibly be happy that his influence
was spreading so far.

No comments:

Post a Comment

About Gordon Kalton Williams

He has devoted himself to understanding the link between words and music and dramatic action, and combines musical sensitivity, command of language and an instinct for the physics of drama.
Australian born, Gordon travels to and from the USA.